This whole thing rambles on a bit longer than I intended, but
I’ve wanted to write a post for a while now that details my journey through the
RPG hobby. This was pretty much an excuse to write that. I skipped over a bunch
of stuff that I could write several pages about (WBS, Rolands’ Cavern, etc.).
You’ll have to hit me up about that later. In person, at a con, with booze is your best
bet.

Anyway, here’s my journey…

Hello, old friends.

The Beginning

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness

Batman: the Roleplaying Game

Hero System: 4th Edition

I’m kind of an outlier among gamers, because I didn’t start
with D&D, nor did I have anyone introduce me to the game. As a kid in the
80s, I was only marginally familiar with D&D as some kind of fantasy
property, but I was a total sci-fi nerd (Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Star Trek)
and didn’t care for anything without robots and spaceships. As I got older, I
was vaguely aware that D&D was a game my uncle played, and there were ads
for it the superhero comics I read, but that was it.

Any excuse to repost these guys.

I got into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness when I saw an ad for it in the back
of one of the Archie TMNT comics. A game where I got to play as one of the
Turtles sounded really cool, so I filled out the order form and sent some of
my paper-boy money to the address and waited. A while later the book arrived in
the mail, filled to bursting with awesome gritty Eastman & Laird art and
the intricate Palladium game system. I taught myself how to be a GM from that
book, and ran many weird and nonsensical adventures with my junior high
friends. I remember the Armidillos of Action were my first PC group—a
quartet of mutant armadillos with a penchant for doing crazy A-Team mods on
whatever vehicles they acquired. We were isolated gamers with no one to ask for advice. Any rules we didn’t grok we had to adjust or make-up on our own.

I ran TMNT all thru junior high. It was the
only game I had. The only place to find other RPGs was 20 miles away at the
Waldenbooks in Sandusky. That means if I wanted to run superheroes or cartoon
kung-fu insects, I had to kitbash my own rules with TMNT as a base. Seems like
I’ve been homebrewing systems since the very beginning!

When I got to high school, I became more mobile, as I
suddenly had older friends with cars. I could finally peruse that RPG section
at Waldenbooks!At the time, I still
wasn’t interested in D&D (although by this time, I had met people who
played it). Instead I wanted superheroes. In 1989, Mayfair put out a stripped
down version of the DC Heroes game called Batman: the Roleplaying Game, to coincide
with the release of the Tim Burton Batman movie. I played that for a little
while until I discovered the Hero System:4th Edition. Because it was a generic system, I had to come up with my own settings
by default. I played a variety of campaigns with Hero System for a few years—supers,
sci-fi, and finally... fantasy. All of them with campaign worlds I created on my
own (Navistar!). I’ve always loved world-building.

At Last, Dungeon
& Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Editon

My friends enjoyed my other games, but eventually, one of
them asked “Look, if we buy you the books, will you just run D&D for us?”
Well of course I couldn’t turn them down. A few weeks later I had a shiny new copy
of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
Players Handbook. I read through it and was hooked. It’s probably not coincidental
that this also about the same time I got heavy into Fritz Lieber and Michael
Moorcock, along with all the Dragonlance
novels. I ran 2nd Edition AD&D all through High School. I still have a pretty good collection of brown and blue "Complete Whatever" handbooks. Like before, I used my own homebrew world (Questor!). This was well past
the golden age of modules, so I never got to play with Keep on the Borderlands
or the Isle of Dread. Instead I ran a lot of stuff out of Dungeon magazine in
all its 90s boxed text and purple prose. Also Ravenloft, one of the few prefab game
worlds I would ever use in 30+ years. I ran AD&D all through high school and into
college.

The Respectable Young Man Turns Splatterpunk

NightLife

Despite my appreciation for Ravenloft, I never cared much
for horror movies. That changed after highschool. When I was about 19, I got
heavy into horror movies, especially the
weird, super-violent Italian stuff and the cheap splatter-fests on the shelves
of the dusty and sketch video rental places that popped up all over Sandusky, Ohio.
By this time, I could drive myself and had a lot of downtime
between classes at ye olde community college. I spent that time off-campus poking around video
stores and Hobby shops. I found NightLife
by Stellar Games on a wire rack in A&B Cycles.

NightLife, I has it! (Also ACE Agents)

NightLife came out about a
year before Vampire: the Masquerade and was totally overshadowed by that angsty juggernaut. But NightLife was different. You played as punk-rock
monsters who never resented their inhuman natures. The game took place in a not-quite-yet-apocalypic New York City as envisioned by a bunch
of Ohio guys who had never actually been to New York. Brad McDevitt’s mohawk'd daemons and sexy zombie ladies
struck a cord. Like D&D before it, I found this game at the right time. At this point in my life I was getting heavy into black metal, industrial, and mid-90s
darkwave. While playing NightLife, my friends and I listened to the Crow, DemonKnight, and Mortal Kombat soundtracks on continual
loops. A couple of us even started using some of the slang used by PCs in the game
when we went to metal concerts at Peabody’s in the Cleveland Flats. Vampire was
for mopey losers, NightLife for was the
hardcore crowd. We sure thought we were sexy dangerous badasses.

We Become Sexy Dangerous Badasses

Mind's Eye Theatre

Changeling the Dreaming

Demon the Fallen

Vampire the Masquerade

Werewolf the Apocalypse

For one reason or another, my gaming died for a few years.
Part of that was due to moving to a new town. Part of it was due bad romantic
relationships. But eventually I got back into gaming thanks (?) to LARPing, the World
of Darkness, and the late 90s Bowling Green goth scene. I moved to Bowling
Green, Ohio in 1998. By the weirdest of coincidences I wound up living three
apartments down from Brad McDevitt, creator of the aforementioned NightLife. It’s a crazy story that I won’t
go into here. Brad and I are still friends, and he's been super suportive over the years.

I pretty quickly became part of the burgeoning goth scene in
Bowling Green. I hadn’t gamed much in the past three years, and had only LARPed
once before in Cleveland. But there was a new World of Darkness LARP starting
up in the back of the bar where the Wednesday night goth night was held. This
was my introduction to the World of Darkness. The game was terrible, and it
consumed our lives. I mean, no one got
lost in the steam tunnels or anything, but LARPing was all we talked about and
was the primary social outlet for a bunch of us. A lot of in-character
rivalries became real-life animosities. Like I said it wasn’t great and ran too
long. But that’s not important. What’s important is that the LARP was where I
met the woman that would become my wife.

Look at these two edgy fucks.

Ivy and I were in the same Sabbat pack in the third failed goth-night LARP. She was a much bigger World of Darkness fan than I was, but
she got me into it more and more as our relationship established itself
(Pokemon too, but that’s not important). The nice thing about dating a gamer is
that the two of you already have half a game group put together. Ivy and I ran a number of
different World of Darkness games over the next few years—mostly Changeling, Werewolf,
and Demon. For all their faults, running Demon and Changeling taught me how to
build complex relationship maps between NPCs and PCs. Ivy is excellent at
running urban sandbox games, where the players have free reign to wander
through her world, interact with her fully developed NPCs, and get into
whatever trouble they can. I learned a lot from her in that regard.

Goth night on Wednesday. World of Darkness on Sundays. Lots
of booze, eyeliner, dancing, concerts, and clove cigarettes in between. That was my 20s.

The One-Two punch of
QAGS and Story Games

QAGS Second Edition

Dogs in the Vineyard

Prime Time Adventures

We got older. Goth night died, and I got tired of dressing
like a vampire (Ivy, not so much). D&D 3rd Edition came out, we
played it, and got thoroughly sick of it well before 4th Edition
made me decide I never wanted to play D&D again.

I don’t have the space here to go into great detail about
how I found QAGS and weaseled my way into becoming part of Hex Games. I did it,
and those Hex guys are some of the best friends I’ve ever had. QAGS got
me to love rule-light systems. With only six stats and one die, you can put an
entire character on an index card. It worked really well for the free-form
online roleplaying I was doing at the time, too. Because the Gimmicks and
Weaknesses were so broadly defined, they were almost free-form as it was. This is
also about the time I discovered "story games." At the time, I was working at the college, and I had a lot of time to listen to these new things called
podcasts. These podcasts introduced me to story games—a movement, it
seemed, started by people who were also sick of D&D.

I never got heavy into GNS theory, and I think I can count on my fingers the number of posts I made on The Forge, but I liked story games a lot. I still like story games! The basic philosophy of story games seemed to be, “you write systems that promote the kind of gameplay you want.” If you want players to get
into difficult personal complications, then you reward them for doing that. If
you want players to try and steal treasure without engaging monsters, you
reward them for that.

The two games that really influenced me were Prime Time Adventures and Dogs in the Vineyard. PTAtaught me a lot
about scene economy and pacing. It taught me how to set things up so every
character eventually gets their own spotlight. Most importantly to me, as a
guy playing a lot of free-form online chat games, it taught me how to establish
interesting scenes. At the end of every scene, you should have learned
something new about the character or something should have changed in the
world. If not, then you’re wasting time and playing house. I still generally hold by this
rule.

Dogs in the Vineyard
blew my mind, man. Vincent Baker’s writing style was unlike anything else I
had encountered, and it changed how I write and present games. He wrote DitV
and presented the rules as though he was sitting across the table from you, all in second person. “Okay, you do this, then you roll these dice. Now I roll these
dice and do this.” It was amazing. DitV also pounded the lesson into me that,
when preparing for an RPG session, you shouldn’t come up with plots or stories,
you should come up with situations. “Here’s the town as it stands now. Here’s
what happened to get it to this point. Here’s the NPCs and what they want. Here’s
what will happen if nothing happens.” After the railroady plots, pages of boxed text,
and convoluted meta-plot of 90s AD&D and World of Darkness, this was
revelatory. It totally revamped how I run games.

The OSR and the return of D&D

Labyrinth Lord

Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition

Dungeon Crawl Classics

Aside from a bunch of convention games I ran for QAGS with
the Hex crew, I ran story games almost exclusively for several years. Dogs in the Vineyard, Apocalypse World,
Fiasco, Monsterhearts, Spirit of the Century (not actually that story gamey,
I think), Smallville (ditto). I don’t
think my players ever liked them as much as I did (although Ivy really loved Dogs in the Vineyard and the Fate Accelerated game she ran based on
Fables). But story games were what I wanted to run, so that’s what we played.

At this point, though, you should realize how my taste in games always change. Eventually, story games started to lose their appeal. I got tired of feeling like all my games had to “mean” something. I
missed the simple joy of going underground someplace where I shouldn't be, taking stuff that didn’t belong to me, and maybe killing a monster along the way.
Thankfully, I was still listening to gaming podcasts, and about this time there
was this sudden surge in “retro-clone” games like Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC. It
wasn’t called the OSR yet, but a lot of people were rediscovering the simple
joy of B/X D&D and its old-stlye brethren. I eventually convinced my game group to let
me run some old-school elf games. I especially enjoyed Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures. The fairytale vibe appealed
to me, and the playbooks had a lot of what I liked with Apocalypse World. Real-world interpersonal
problems within my game group would be the death-knell of those games, sadly. I
did manage to run a few Labyrinth Lord games online, however, thanks to the advent of G+ and Roll20.

Eventually D&D 5th Edition came out, and much
to my surprise I loved it. It reminded me that yes, I actually did like mainstream
D&D. My kid was 16 when Fifth Edition
came out, and was ready to join our game table. So that was a major bonus, too (they played a frighteningly effective Assassin).

I have a whole separate blog post about Dungeon Crawl Classics and why I love it. You should go read that.None of my praise has changed. The best thing I discovered about DCC,
though, is the wonderfully supportive and creative fanbase that sprung up
around it. Zines, websites, and third-party publishers, all with the awesome
support of the Goodman Games crew. It’s great, maybe my favorite
fandom for just about anything.

Today

And that’s it! That’s where I am today, a 40-something petite bourgious ex-goth gamer dude. I skipped over a whole bunch of stuff. I barely got into all the (embarrassing) online chat-based
roleplaying I did through my 20s and 30s. I didn’t talk at all about my
podcasting adventures with Monkeys Took My Jetpack, Porcelain Llama Theater, Of Steam Steel & Murder, and others. I didn’t mention Deadlands (pre-Savage Worlds), Zorcer
of Zo, Dragonstar, Houes of the Blooded, Fiasco, or Stars Without Number. Those are all stories for another time, I
guess. Hit me up anywhere if you want the gory details.

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

You’re Bobby Joe Sludge, apocalypse trucker. You’ve been hired to take this load of toilet paper and beer across the irradiated badlands to the good people of Possum Junction. All you have to help you is your truck, your guts, and your grampa’s old shotgun. Best get a move on, son!

A ways back, in November, I put together a one-page adventure for QAGS. We passed it out for free at the Hex Games booth at Archon with our schedule of events on the back. I meant to share it earler, but well... time makes fools of us all.

Truck Amok is a post-apocalypse adventure designed for one player and one GM, although I imagine it can be expanded pretty easily to accomadate a group of players. You can play it using the free QAGS Qik Start rules, or you can adapt it to your favorite rules-lite RPG system.

Thursday, January 10, 2019

Satan loves himself some wizards! Magic Users already walk
the crooked line of Chaos as they attune their minds to alien magics, but not
enough of them are properly evil. The
Devil wants to change that, of course. Old Scratch will gladly grant gifts of
power to any wizard who signs their name in his black book and pledges their
soul to the Prince of Hell.

These benefits are for Magic Users only. Sorry, elves, you
don’t have souls, and Satan isn’t interested.

These rules were written with Lamentations of the Flame
Princess in mind, but should adapt to other old-style games with a little
tweaking.

My magic
user just made a deal with Satan! Now what?

Good for you!

Well, the bad news is you can no longer cast spells on holy
ground, and you are burned by holy water (1d6 damage per vial). You cannot
benefit from spells cast by lawful characters. Also, you now have some sort of easily-hidden
witch-mark on your body, like a moon-shaped birthmark or an extra set of
nipples.

Whenever you have enough XP to level up, you must sacrifice
an number of non-chaotic humans with Hit Dice or levels equal to your new level
(0-level humans count as 1 HD for this) before you can gain the benefits of
your next level. This sacrifice must be done in a properly spooky folk-horror
or black-metal fashion--stone altar in an ancient groove, black mass, blood
orgy, wicker man, whatever. The GM has final call on whether or not it’s wicked
enough. This sacrifice will be attended
by a demonic representative of Lucifer with HD equal to your new level (which
means, like, Orcus himself shows up to your party at level 20).

Now here’s what you get for all your trouble. When you level
up, that demonic servitor will put a nice new spell of the highest level you
can now cast into your spellbook. The spell is randomly determined by the GM,
but you learn it instantly, without having to spend any time or money
researching or transcribing it. This is in addition to any other spells you may
or may not normally gain by leveling up as a Magic User.

If you convince another Magic User to join the ranks of
Satan, you gain XP equal to twice the amount you would have earned for killing
them.

Also, when you level up, roll 1d20 on the Satanic Gifts table. Entries marked
with an asterisk can be gained more than once, with cumulative benefits.
Otherwise, a duplicate roll gets you nothing this level (and Satan laughs!).

Satanic Gifts

1) Secrets Stolen from
Heaven*: You add one cleric spell to your spellbook, chosen at random, of
the highest level you can cast (maximum spell level: 7). You can memorize and
cast this spell as a normal Magic User spell. You can scribe scrolls of this
spell, usable by MUs and Elves but not clerics. Other magic users cannot copy
the spell into their books, however, unless they also have this gift.

2) Forever Young:
You stop aging.

3) Hex Appel*: Your
Charisma bonus increases by 1 (maximum +4).

4) Skyclad: When you
are naked (jewelry and hats are acceptable) your AC is increased by your CHA bonus
+1 (minimum 1).

5) Black Kisses*:
Once per day, your kiss can cause narcotic sleep for 1d6 hours unless your
victim makes a save vs. poison Additional instances of this gift increase the
number of times per day you may use this poison kiss.

6) Luciferian Prodigy:
The time required for you to learn or transcribe spells is cut in half.

7) Toil and Trouble:
The time it takes you to craft potions is cut in half.

8) Demonic Scribe:
The time it takes you to create spell scrolls is cut in half.

9) Malefactor: The
time it takes you to craft wands and staves is reduced by 25%

10) Typhoid Mary: You
are immune to mundane diseases, although you can still act as an infection vector.

11) Blessing of Brimstone:
You take half damage from fire (and nothing if you succeed in a save that would
normally reduce the damage to half). You are also immune to mundane hot
weather, up to blistering desert temperatures.

12) Ninth Circle: You
take half damage from cold (and nothing if you succeed in a save that would normally
reduce the damage to half). You are also immune to mundane cold weather, up to
subarctic temperatures.

13) Eat Your Heart Out*:
Once per day, you may eat the still-warm, raw heart of a human and heal 1d6hp,
plus 1 extra hit point per Hit Die or level (0-level characters count a 1). You
can double this amount if the heart donor is a virgin. Eating a heart takes 1
turn. Additional instances of this gift increase the number of times per day
you can eat a heart, but doesn’t increase the damage healed per meal.

14) Parselmouth*:
You can speak to snakes and have a +1 reaction bonus with them.

15) Black Phillip: Once
per night, you can polymorph into a large, black goat. This
transformation takes 1 turn, during which time you are considered stunned and
helpless. As a goat, you can speak is a sultry whisper but cannot cast spells. You instantly revert back to normal at dawn or if you are brought to
0hp or less. You cannot end the transformation early.

Goat: AC: 12; HD: 2, Horns +2 (1d4), Movement: 150' (50')

16) Child of Darkness*: Gain
2 dots in the Stealth skill. Additional instances of this gift increase Stealth
by 1, to a maximum of 6 dots.

17) Red Right Hand*:
Your base attack bonus increases by 1.

18) Horny: Once per night
you may sprout a wicked pair of serrated goat horns from your head. You can
attack with these for 1d8 damage. The horns disappear at dawn. You cannot get
rid of them sooner.

19) Red Nails: Once
per night you may sprout wicked claws from your fingertips. You can make two
attacks per round with these for 1d4 damage each. The claws disappear at dawn. You
cannot get rid of them sooner.

20) Strike Back from the
Grave: If someone kills you, you arise 1d3 rounds later as an undead
creature with HD equal to your level and powers linked to your manner of death. As an evil revenant, you're an NPC now, but at least you can take some solace in revenge. (The GM should at least let you play your initital rampage.)

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Our third Lamentations
of the Flame Princess session was shorter than the first two. One of our
players (Julius the fighter) couldn’t make it, and the rest of the group was
loathe to get into too much trouble without him. Most of the session revolved
around travel and administrative work, as well as an admirable amount of
roleplaying. They also fought some wolves and barely
escaped with their lives. By the end of the session, though, they were properly set
up to go straight into their next adventure.

(This play report should be spoiler free and safe for my players to read.)

Stay a while and
listen…

Our Cast

Belinda Kage: Serpentblood
1, Midwife.

Madeline: Specialist 1,
Grave Robber.

Mortimer: Alice 1,
Librarian.

“Matthew”: Outlander 1,
Iriquois warrior and former slave.

Absent PCs

Julius Cervantes: Fighter
1, Former witch hunter.

NPCs

Ana Fischer: Rescued
witch.

Deacon Girnot: Deacon of
Nonsbeck's church. Intelligence and charisma sold off to the Ghoul Market.

The players exit the tunnel from the Ghoul Market and return to Nonsbeck. Madeline replaces the slab in the side of the
monument that leads to the tunnel. The slab easily ker-chunks back into place, almost as though it’s magnetic. The
party leaves the cemetery just as the first cock crows. They shuffle Girnot into
his shed and retrieve the Black Book of
Agamot from the hole under some haystacks where the deacon had hidden it. Confident
that they’ve covered all traces of their otherworldly explorations, the party makes
their way back to the inn.

Most of the party crashes into their beds and fall right asleep, but
Belinda stays awake to eagerly copy the spells from the Black Book into her own spellbook. She is happy to discover that
she now has access to Summon and Transylvanian Hunger (from Vaginas are Magic). Particularly, the
regenerative benefits of Transylvanian Hunger
might allow her to fix her face or replace the seemingly inevitable lost
limbs that have been plaguing the group.

While the PCs doze away in their rooms, word quickly spreads across town
that something has happened to Deacon Girnot. He seems to have gone quite mad,
babbling incoherently about a nightmare world and monsters underground. The
party had sold off a large chunk of his intelligence and charisma to the
Exchequer (Session 2). While it didn’t erase his memory like they’d hoped it would, it left
him unable to form coherent thoughts or express them to others. The villagers
send a boy to a nearby town to get a physician, but there’s already talk of
sending the poor man to an asylum.

Around noon, the PCs finally wake up and face the day. Belinda has
allowed Ana to borrow her spellbook, and the witch dedicates herself to copying
spells into her own fresh new book. (This gives a good boost to Ana’s Loyalty
score.) Mortimer goes off to one of the local farms to chop wood for a few
extra coppers, while Belinda buys a puppy from another farm. Her eventual goal
is get a whole pack of loyal doggos. Madeline offers to help the innkeeper’s
wife pluck chickens in order to pay for the party’s dinner. Since the grave
robber has a fresh new demon arm, she refuses to take off her gloves or roll up
her sleeves, even while elbow-deep in chicken blood. This causes some questions
from Gella the serving girl, but Madeline manages to wave off her concerns. Meanwhile,
Matthew heads a few miles out of town to scout around the road ahead. He finds
several wolf tracks and the signs of a small pack operating in the area.

As the sun sets, everyone meets back in the Laughing Ox inn. Ana comes
from downstairs, still clearly high from the narcotics required to research and
transcribe spells, but proud of her success. Between the restoration of her
previously fire-scarred face and the on-going reconstruction of her spellbook,
the witch has clearly grown more confident and ambitious. Belinda notices that
Ana is transcribing spells (“copying recipes
into your new cookbook”) a lot
quicker than expected. “Oh. It must be because they’re recipes I already knew
and am only relearing,” Ana explains. This seems reasonable to Belinda and the
matter drops for now.

It’s a busy night at the Laughing Ox. There are several farmers here, as
well as another group of traveling soldiers and the two nuns the PCs had talked
to previously. The nuns are eager to leave the village soon, but the PCs convince
them to wait one more day and then they will escort them to the convent of St.
Agnes as agreed.

The topic of Girnot eventually comes up. Asylums are
terrible places, but no one seems to be too upset about sending the weasley
deacon away. On the other hand, if the party decides to take him with them,
they can use him to carry equipment and stuff. Belinda and Matthew decide to go
and talk to Father Cristoff and ask for his permission to take Girnot with
them.

In the church, Father Decaon sits in a pew, drinking heartily from a
bottle of schnapps. He seems to be in a surprisingly jovial mood. Belinda and
Matthew suggest letting them take Girnot with them in order to spare him the
indignity of the asylum. “Yes! An excellent idea!” the priest agrees, almost
before the words are out of Matthew’s mouth. “In fact, here’s 25 silver thalers to
help with travel expenses! Let’s drink a toast to poor Girnot’s health.”
Schnapps are poured, toasts are made, and a deal is struck.

Belinda and Matthew go to Girnot’s shed to tell him the
news. The (now former) deacon is in a bad way. His shed smells of piss and
sweat, and he’s clearly been digging around looking for the Black Book. He is terrified of the PCs, because
he knows they did something to him,
but can’t properly comprehend what. The thought of going underground fills him
with horror. He’s also calling himself “Conrad” now for some reason. Matthew
tells him they are going to take him with them to the convent “You know, where
the nice ladies are. Maybe they can help you.”

The next day passes without incident. Belinda and Ana continue
to copy spells, while the others buy and sell equipment and prepare for travel.
Finally, the party leaves bright and early the next morning. The PCs and their
ersatz henchmen are on horses, and the nuns ride a couple of stout mules. The little convoy
heads north along the muddy road to Hegendorf, there to turn east toward the
abbey of St. Agnes. The whole trip should take a day. Julius (whose player is absent) stays behind
in Nonsbeck to look after affairs.

Halfway to Hegendorf, danger rears its baleful head. The
party hears they baying of hungry wolves. It’s winter in a time of constant
war, so the beasts have almost certainly tasted human flesh. Four wolves bare
down on them, charging towards their horses with terrible speed.

But the party has arrows, bolts, bullets, and several rounds
before the wolves’ teeth can get at them. They are rightfully afraid that the
gunfire will spook the horses, so Matthew, Belinda, Mortimer, and Ana leap off
their mounts. Madeline grabs the rest of the horses and leads them, Girnot, and
the nuns away from the combat, hopefully keeping them safe from the wolves.

The PCs take time to aim at the wolves (they’re still at
long distance), while Ana begins chanting an alien rune. The air around here
glows, and smoke pours from her mouth as she summons a smoke demon with
multiple antenna and jointed eyes. She does remarkably well on her control roll
and permanently bonds the demon (thanks to Ramanan’s awesome Summon app). The witch
crows in triumph, feeling like a real spellcaster once more. Thankfully,
Madeline is leading the nuns away, so they don’t notice this obvious display of
sorcery.

Bullets and arrows fly. Two wolves are wounded, but none are
killed outright. The smoke demon engages with another wolf, lashing it with
festering wounds. There’s another round of fire from arrows and bolts. The
alpha wolf is wounded as are two other wolves. The two lesser wolves fail their
morale checks and flee. The fourth wolf continues to fight the demon, both exchanging
damage. Matthew issues a war whoop, successfully drawing the attention of the wounded
alpha wolf.

The wolf fighting the demon finally kills it. The
wolf is badly wounded, but maddened by pain. From a distance, Madeline fires
her pistol at the wolf but misses. Mortimer the Alice expresses his Frustration. He recalls a bit of
information about wolves—they can often be distracted by fresh meat. This isn’t
immediately helpful, because all they have on them is hardtack and dried beans.

"We leveled up!"

The alpha wolf is upon them! It leaps upon Matthew and tears
off the outlander’s arm! He’s bleeding out and will be dead in moments. The good news is the wolves
now have fresh meat! The alpha runs off with Matthew's arm, and
the reaming wolf follows its leader. The wolves, having gotten what they
wanted, have technically won this combat encounter.

Belinda’s chirurgy kit is on her person, not her horse, so she
is able to quickly staunch Matthew’s bleeding. Madeline returns with the nuns.
The younger sister looks positively green and ready to faint. Even though there’s
a nice easy-to-follow blood trail, the PC’s decide not to track down the
wolves. They know how to get to the Ghoul Market. Once they get their hands on
a Writ of Protection, maybe they’ll get Matthew a new arm.

Hegerndorf was only an hour away, so the party packs up their
unconscious friend and heads to the village. Hegendorf is another small
village, maybe even smaller than Nonsbeck, without a proper church or
tavern. But the people there know the nuns, and are willing to help the
wounded outlander. The PCs spend only an hour in Hegendorf, reapplying bandages and
giving Matthew some strong drink to dull the pain. They head east along
the trail to the convent of St. Agnes where they are assured Sister
Brunhilde is a talented surgeon.

At the convent, the party is greeted by several nuns,
excited that their missing sisters have returned safely. Ana the witch seems
reluctant to enter, but Belinda convinces her to come along. “What, does it
burn?” she chides the witch. Matthew is shuffled off to the infirmary where he is
attended to by Sister Brunhilde, a short, warty troll of a woman with the hands
of an angel. Girnot/Conrad is locked into a nice comfy cell where he can’t cause any trouble. The rest of the party is invited to the dining hall for a simple
but hearty meal of turnips, peas, bread, and short beer. The nuns they party
escorted relate the events of their trip to the mother superior, Mother Ruth. They commend the party’s bravery and honesty.

At dinner they meet a permanent guest of the convent. A
nameless but harmless madman the sisters simply call “Mensch.” He showed up on
the doorstep of the convent a year ago, babbling nonsense about a “Pale Lady.”
He is a eunuch, so the mother superior allowed him to stay here. The PCs try engaging
him in conversation, and he only babbles about the “Pale Lady, the Queen of
Flowers” and how he and his sister were taken by her beastmen as a child, had
his genitals removed, and forced to work in fields of flower with other men,
women, and children. He only escaped when a man in a starry robe told him the
secret words that let him escape her realm.

After dinner and evening mass, Mother Ruth invites the party
into her office. She tells them how Mensch came to the convent almost a year
ago, and confirms much of the story they have already heard. She has had to piece
together the story from Mensch’s ravings over the course of several months. The
nearby woods are supposedly haunted by a witch or demon, and her beast men
kidnap children every winter. Mensch and his sister were kidnapped unknown
years ago, when he was a child. The Pale Lady welcomes occultists to her home
who enter as young men and leave aged. One of these wizards told Mensch how to
escape through the hedges using a complicated magical phrase.

In his ravings, Mensch also mentioned a gleaming white cube
of stone. Mother Ruth believes this is one of the fabled “Words of Creation”
cast down to Earth after God created the world. Mother Ruth would like the
party to travel to the Pale Lady’s realm and find out more about this Word of
Creation. If they do this for her, she will give them the Sword of Prester John,
an artifact the convent has hidden for many generations.

The gateway to the Pale Lady’s realm will be accessible
only on the Winter Solstice. That’s only two days away…

Sunday, January 6, 2019

Only three sessions into our Lamentations of the Flame Princess game, and already two different PCs have lost an arm in combat (all thanks to Cavegirl's Horrible Wounds rules).

That's awesome!

So now they're planning on making another trip to the Ghoul Market to visit the Skinsmith. I get the feeling the PCs are going to give the him a lot of repeat business with limb replacement. Of course, that crafty old demon likes to improvise with these sort of operations, and you rarely leave with the arm you hoped to get.

Time to make a new table!

When you visit the Skinsmith to replace an arm, pay 1d6x100sp and roll 1d12 on the table below:

Oh my god! What has the Skinsmith replaced my arm with?

Scaly, clawed demon arm (1d4 damage from claws)

Suckered tentacle (+5’ reach).

Skeleton arm with mummified sinews.

Some H. R. Giger biomechanical monstrosity.

Thorny, leafy, plant-like limb (can grow into a sword,
1d8 damage).

A snake! (Bite only does 1 damage, but target must make a save vs poison or take damage equal to 2d4 + your CON bonus).

Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Our second Lamentations of the Flame Princess session had
less action than the first, but involved a lot more roleplaying and offered
some much desired decompression. The group layed low and recuperated for a few days,
met the new party members, then traveled to the nearby village of Nonsbeck
(poor, doomed, Nonsbeck), buried their dead, and visited the Ghoul Market.

I was very conflicted about introducing the Ghoul Market so
early into the campaign. My instinct with these sort of games is to introduce
the horrific and fantastic elements slowly, so they remain weird an alien. I
was afraid of making the ghouls and devils of the Market too familiar and thus
reduce their effectiveness. On the other hand, one of the problems I had with
my old D&D 5th Edition game was that I waited too long to
introduce all the weird stuff, and certainly Dungeon Crawl Classics doesn’t worry
about that sort of thing. In the end, I decided to throw caution to the wind.
If the ghouls wind up seeming too much like “people,” then I guess that will
just make the real alien horrors even more alien.

The session starts with Belinda, Madline, Mortimer, and Ana tending
to their wounds. Once everyone is on their feet, they gather up the
bodies of the dead from last session. They pile their enemies’ corpses into a
great big pyre. They bury their dead comrades Hector and Tranquilo in the snow so they keep
relatively fresh until they can get a proper burial.

As the survivors keep warm by the pyre, Belinda notices Ana
gathering up the charred remnants of the book she was to burned with. The
accused witch is barely holding back tears and seems distraught. Belinda
recognizes the scraps as the remains of a spellbook. She confides in the witch
that she too is a spellcaster, and promises to help her recompile her lost
spell book. This earns her Ana’s gratitude and (for now) loyalty.

Meanwhile, Julius and Matthew have been traveling together
for few days, and notice the warm glow of a fire and the smell of cooking meat coming
from the ruins of the old Roman fort. They ride up to the camp and announce
themselves. The grizzled Spaniard and dusky-skinned warrior from the New World
surprise the group of survivors, but Julius and Matthew are just as surprised
by the horrifically mutilated quartet before them. Questions are made and explanations
are offered, but eventually the two groups of misfits decide to join forces. PC
party reestablished!

The party has pretty decent shelter and plenty of food in
the ruins of the fort, so they decide to recover here for a few days until
everyone is properly healed up. Belinda’s chirurgy skills help speed this
along. While the wounded rest, Matthew and Julius keep watch. On the third day,
a rabid bear wanders out of the forest and jumps on a nearby deer (random encounter!). The PCs don’t
believe the fort’s crumbling walls will keep the bear out, so they quickly
hustle everyone indoors and try to wrangle their horses into a tower. One of
the horses gets spooked and breaks free, running off. The rabid bear gives
chase!

Matthew and Julius decide the bear is too much of a threat
to leave alive so they open fire with their muskets, cycling through extra guns
while Mortimer (who’s fully healed at this point) reloads for them. The angry
bear charges towards them, making its way through the large gaps in the fort wall.
Musket balls hit a few more times, but it gets within melee range before
they can completely drop it. Julius’s spear catches the bear as it charges,
striking a devastating wound, but the maddened beast will fight to the death!
Matthew leaps at the bear with his French tomahawk, and the bear turns on the Iroquois.
The beast’s claws and teeth savage his flesh, tearing flesh away from his hand
and arm (luckily he makes his poison save, and doesn’t catch rabies). Desperate, Matthew lashes out with his dagger
in his good hand while Julius stabs and stabs again with his spear. Finally the
rabid beast falls. Matthew crawls out to join the rest of the convalescing PCs,
while Mortimer and Julius drag the diseased carcas away from the fort.

The next few days are peaceful, and eventually everyone is
back on their feet. Before they leave the fort, they decide to explore the
secret tunnel in the jail cell below. They use Madeline’s pick and shovel to
work on widening the tunnel, while the rangy Matthew crawls ahead on his belly
with a lantern pushed ahead of him. The outlander discovers that the tunnel connects
to an ancient Roman aqueduct, knee deep with cold, clean water. After some
debate, the PCs decide not to explore the aqueduct for now and prepare to head
east towards the village of Nonsbeck. Maybe they’ll find some work there. They
bundle up the bodies of their dead friends and head down the road.

On the road to Nonsbeck, they come across a man pulling a
wagon load of dead bodies to a nearby mass grave (random encounter!). Apparently a nearby village
(not Nonsbeck) has been recently wiped out by the Red Plague (seting up The Punchline for later). He offers to
take their friends’ corpses off their hands (“Plenty of room on the old cart!”)
but the PCs decline and give the man their farewells.

Eventually, they make their way to Nonsbeck, a pleasant
little village that would certainly never fall prey to demonic terror. The whole place is decorated for Christmas and
seems perfectly pleasant. The hilltop church of St. Margaret is their first
stop. They are greeted by Deacon Girnot, a greasy weasel of a character who is
not at all pleased to see a bunch of mutilated weirdos on the church’s
doorstep. The good priest Father Cristof, however is more friendly to strangers
and ushers them into the church. The PCs explain (lie) that they were attacked
on the road and two of their friends were killed, and hope the priest could give
them a proper burial. Father Cristof is saddened by their tale. Of course he’ll
arrange for burial first thing in the morning. For now, they can keep the
bodies in the shed where Girnot sleeps. The deacon is not at all pleased to be
put out of his room by a bunch of strange corpses.

The party’s next stop is the stable where they meet the
friendly stable boy Reiner. They pay him for a week’s worth of stabling in
advance, as they plan on staying here for a bit. Then it’s off to the inn for
some food and rest. The inn is busy this night. A group of farmers drinks
mulled ale and sings Christmas songs. A small group of five soldiers are spending
the night here while on their way to Berlin, a merchant and his guards have made this their stop for the night, and two travelling nuns also have rooms.

The party makes arrangements to
rent the last two rooms and settle in to eat. While they are eating, Belinda
notices that the soldiers are starting to get “handsy” with Gela, the nice
young barmaid. The buxom redheaded serpentblood saddles over to the soldiers and
snags their attention away from the younger girl. While the soldiers thusly
distracted, Belinda takes some of the opium form her chirurgy kit and spikes
the soldiers’ beer. Soon the soldiers are all unconscious, and the inn is a
much more pleasant place.

Meanwhile, Julius talks to the nuns. They are on their way
to the convent of St. Agnes, about a day away. The men escorting them along the
road have abandoned them, and it’s a dangerous world out there. Julius offers
the party’s aid in escorting them, if they are willing to wait a few days. The
older nun decides that arriving late is better than arriving dead, so they
reluctantly agree to wait for the PCs to finish their business.

The next morning, Father Cristoff performs a nice but simple
funeral for Tranquilo and Hector. The party springs for a couple
of nice headstones (and the money so spent becomes XP for their new characters,
Matthew and Julius). While in the cemetery, Madeline notices a large monument bearing a statue of the Virgin Mother. It is clearly old as it is covered in
moss and the inscriptions have long worn away. But on the back of this
monument she sees a white ankh, the sign of the ghoul market!

The party spends the rest of the day lazing about the town
or chopping wood for extra silver. But when night falls, they head back to the cemetery
to investigate the marked monument. It’s starless and bible black. The moon is
nothing but a thin sliver behind the clouds, and all the lights are out in the village.
The only sound is deacon Girnot’s snoring from his nearby shed. They manage to
find the monument again, and Madeline works her shovel into a crack in the base.
She moves a slab away to reveal narrow, steep stairs descending into the cold
earth. Madeline, Beleinda, Mortimer, and Ana head down into the foggy darkness.
Matthew doesn’t wish to walk on burial land, and Julius feels guilty about
desecrating the dead, so they decide to stay topside and stand guard. We have
split the party!

The stairs widen and grow less steep as the quartet descends,
but it still takes them 30 minutes to reach the bottom. The stairs lead to a large
tunnel filled with low-fog and shards of old bone. They refill their lantern
and press on.

Topside, Matthew and Julius grow worried. Their friends have
been down there for a half-an-hour or more. The decide that deacon Girnot (that
sleazy weasel) must know something. They sneak into his shed and awake him with
a sword held to his throat. Girnot looks up in fear. “Did Agamot send you?”
Who? The PCs have never heard of this man. After some graphic threats and a
failed Morale check, they learn the truth. Girnot stole a book from a wizard in
Heidelberg named Agamot. He suspects the wizard has sent people after him. “What’s
buried under this cemetery? Who’s buried under the Madonna gravestone?” they
demand. Girnot claims he doesn’t know. The grave’s been here longer than anyone
remembers. He doesn’t think there’s anything under the cemetery other than more
dirt and worms. Matthew and Julius don’t quite believe him, so they grab the deacon
and frog-march him to the cemetery and drag him with them as they head down the
stairs to the Ghoul Market.

Meanwhile, deep below the earth, the first group continues down
the tunnel for an hour before it comes to a large cavern. A wall of skulls stretches
across the cavern, and two statues of faceless angels form an entrance arch
with their wings. Black-bannered market stalls are scattered among crumbling
crypts and mausoleums of ancient design. Green flames burn in large iron
lanterns suspended from the ceiling. The smell of rot, spices, and cooking meat
fills the air. The dead and damned wander the isles, buying and selling. This
is the Ghoul Market!

The PCs walk to the central square. They can feel hungry
eyes watching them, but they use the timeless social tactic of “acting like we belong here."Belinda still has a sword
blade through her head and rough stiches across her face, and the cenobite look helps sell the
illusion. The central square features a dry fountain with a large statue of a
nude medusa. Behind that lies Cold Ethyl’s Pleasure House, a desecrated
cathedral of black stone with a crucified nude woman writhing and moaning on
the cross in ecstasy. The PCs decide to
ignore that for now and follow a road sign towards the Skinsmith.

In the cavern of the Skinsmith, they are greeted by a robed
dwarf with a patchwork face, one of the Skinsmith’s minions. Of course they will be
able to fix Madeline's arm and repair Belinda and Ana’s scarred faces. Sadly the
party does not have enough money. But the dwarf is glad to inform them that the
Exchequer will trade them silver for parts of their vital essence (250sp per attribute
point permanently sold). The PCs have some scores they aren’t really using, so
this sounds like a good deal to them. They chit-chat with the dwarf for a bit before
leaving, and find out that a human wizard known as Lord Prospero frequents the
Ghoul Market. They file this info for later.

As they leave to find the Exchequer, they run into Matthew
and Julius, who have finally arrived in the Market. They have Girnot all tied
up so they look like slavers (“so we look like we belong). The party is
reunited, so they all head to the Exchequer for some easy money.

The Exchequer has a tent in the main square. He is a hulking
creature in dusty yellow robes with a cage of fire where his head should be.
The PCs have a new idea. Since Girnot is their "slave" now, his Essence is theirs
to sell! Plus, if they reduce his Intelligence and Charisma low enough, he won’t
be able to tell anyone what the PCs have been doing (“And if he dies, well, he doesn’t
seem like someone anyone will miss.”). The Exchequer pulls silver cobwebs out
of Girnot’s face, reducing his INT and CHA to 4 and 3, respectively. The deacon
is now very stupid and poorly spoken, and the party is several thousand silver oboli richer.

Pleased with themselves, the party heads back to the Skinsmith.
Madeline wants her old arm re-attached, but it’s too far gone. Instead, the great
cyclopean demon gives her a new arm covered in green scales and orange hair,
ending in a taloned claw (1d4 damage!). Belinda doesn’t quite trust the
Skinsmith to remove the blade from her head (and she kind of likes the cenobite
look), so she just has him grind the metal down so it’s not sticking out any
more. Ana whispers something in the demon’s ear (she’s actually in league with
Satan, remember, though the PCs still don’t know this). The Skinsmith nods
in ascent. When he’s done with his work, Ana’s hair and skin is replaced. She’s
beautiful, but her skin has a weird too-tight almost-artificial look to it.

Next, it’s off to the antiquities and sundries section of the
market. Belinda buys magical inks and psychoactives so Ana can begin to make
copies of Belinda’s spells. Julius buys a lightweight coat of bone chainmail from
a purple woman of Carcosa. Madeline buys a glove to cover her demon hand. It’s here that the PC’s hear a hissing, hungry voice
behind them “You look like you’re new to the Ghoul Market, how delicious.” A
group of six hungry ghouls have come up behind them. The rest of the market
looks on with interest. When the PCs came to the market, there was a 1-in-8
chance of them running into “hungry complications” from the patrons. Each time
they went someplace new, this chance went up by 1. They were lucky for a long
time, but I finally rolled low enough for the ghouls to make their move. “You
don’t have a Writ of Protection,” says the lead ghoul. “That means you’re meat
for the taking. But we’ll give you a break, just give us one of your number and
leave.”

I fully expected my players to hand over Grinot, but they are
craftier than that. “I wouldn’t mess with us! We’re on business for Agamot the
wizard.”

Sure enough, since they are in the antiquities section of the Market, Lord Prospero is here with his servant Catherwood. Prospero is a decadent Vincent Price sort of wizard, and Catherwood is a stooped old man carrying a large cabinet full of
Prospero’s goods. Both wear a scroll around their necks that reads: “The bearer
of this writ of protection shall be afforded all the hospitality and safety due
a guest of Prince Dracula and his official representatives.”

Prospero is drunk and in a good mood, but he doesn’t corform to the PCs’ lies. “I assure you that amateur Agamot is no friend of mine!” The
party quickly explains that Girnot stole one of the rival wizard’s books. “Well in that
case, anyone who causes Agamot such irritation is certainly welcome in my
company!” He extends his one-time protection to the PCs for the night, and the
hungry ghouls slink off disappointed. The party talks with Prospero for a bit.
They find the libertine wizard charming, and he finds the adventurers
amusing. He invites them to come visit him in his castle sometime “And bring
that book of Agamot’s. I will pay you well for it!”

The party has made a new friend and finished their shopping
while narrowly avoiding being eaten by ghouls. They decide they’ve pushed their
luck enough for one night and leave the Market. The PCs emerge from the cemetery
just as dawn breaks over Nonsbeck.

Treasure Gained:

Nothing that earned them XP, but..

300sp in Ghoul Market oboli, left over from shopping

Carcosan bone mail that protects like chain but encumbers like leather.

"Thanks for visiting!"

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Who I Am

I am a long-time gamer who enjoys both new-style story games and old-style OSR stuff. I love drawing maps and goofy monsters. I help write, layout, and illustrate games for Hex Games, and I keep taking stabs at creating webcomics with mixed results. I talk about RPGs (and other things) at my Bernie the Flumph blog.